I talk Bird.

Jay Chou is here in town again, but instead of putting on my sexiest outfit and going down to wherever he is at to entice him into my bedroom, I was somewhere in the heartlands locking eyes with a Blue jay. As I silently thumped my chest with the dramatics of a newly widowed housewife and wailed about the point of my existence (all in my mind, of course), the African Grey beside me sqwawked loudly. He had the cheek to laugh at me!

Behind me, the orchestra of Amazons quarreled, lovebirds twittered, and turtledove cooed in what seemed to be a horrible symphony gone haywire. Yes, I was at a bird shop working, because apparently, it is my job to be there. A curious blend of bird poo, seeds and unbathed feathers mixing with the aroma of warmed up food from the buffet table almost made me throw up. I smiled rather convincingly at the boss of the bird shop as he urged me to “Eat first! You can do your things later!”

I stood right at the corner of walkway, avoiding as much as I could the seemingly obsessed bird lovers as they showed off and boasted about their own birds and kept going “Up, up, Big Boy! Puff up and show them what you’ve got!” Pun unintended, I swear. I waited for my colleague who should have turned up 45 minutes ago, and ended up having a meaningful conversation with a gorgeous grey Cockatoo with red tipped feathers, who was perched on a railing far away from the other parrots. Such charmers, those birds.

After one and a half hours, I ignored my colleague’s messages asking me to wait for her and left. My job was completed in less than 15 minutes. I was waiting there like a fool. It was raining heavily, and even though I had walked more than 200m away from the shop, I could still hear the birds loudly in my head.

I tried to figure my way around the labyrinthine layout of the neighbourhood. Thankfully, I had remembered my way in and soon found myself on a road where every freaking person standing by the kerb was waiting for a cab. I waited fruitlessly for 15 minutes before I started walking. I didn’t know where I was, the bus numbers didn’t look familiar, and the rain was harsh. Many times, I stood in the middle of road looking left and right like a scene out of Lost in Translation.

It came to a point where I felt like crying. I had been walking for so long with no empty cab in sight. I simply wanted to sit down somewhere and stamp my feet until someone comes to my rescue. Then, I saw an empty cab rejecting a family of four. He’s not going their way, will he be going mine?